“Anyway can someone explain to me Descartes proof of God's in his 3rd and 5th mediation. I'm just little unclear. I understand to a point but not enough that I can participate in any class discussion's (sic) without feeling like I'm making a fool out of myself. And I'm a honors student here! :(
Thanks in advance. I really appreciate it. “
Well! I also must have read something about it in Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy’ and have come across the theme several times, but I confess nothing sticks to my mind. It is like Teflon! Each time I come across the word ‘Ontological’ I keep running back into the dictionary to find out what it means. The dictionary defines ‘Ontology’ as follows :-
| — n | |
| 1. | philosophy the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being |
| 2. | logic the set of entities presupposed by a theory |
As to the first definition given above it may be useful to add :
It is the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such.
Further something that ‘IS’ is said to exist and is called a being. And many argue that God is a Being.
In the light of these considerations and definitions of the word ‘ontology’, Descartes offered an Ontological argument that God exists. To briefly sum it up (as he discusses in his book ‘Meditations’)
Because Descartes had the IDEA of God, there must be a God to receive that idea from. So God exists! The definiion of God at such point of writing was "That greater than which cannot be conceived." In other words, it is something greater than whatever you can imagine. Descartes probes various ideas about God's 'objective reality'--the representational qualities and content that makes up the idea of God : -
God is generally conceived and explained to be infinite, independent (was not created), supremely powerful, supremely beneficent, supremely intelligent, and the creator of everything. All six of these qualities added up to be the idea/concept of "Perfection". (As a curious aside I draw the attention of readers to the god ‘Kartikeya’ also called ‘Muruga’ in South India or even as ‘Shanmukha’ or six-faced which is supposed to reflect six potencies of his divine nature)
God exists--->God is perfect--->God is not a deceiver--->Therefore the Light of Nature (God) can be trusted.
It is kind of a bad argument. This argument is weak because together with the ideas about the existence of God, there are also many theories about the non-existence of God. If God exists and He is not a deceiver, then how do these theories arise? Since we know that they have arisen, how can it be proved that they are wrong?
There is also the explanation of the problem of Evil. If God is Omnipotent, and if God is supremely ‘Good’ and if God is also ‘Just’, then how does Evil arise? Is there something that is Supremely Bad that balances out the Supremely Good? Is such a thing a necessity?
Descartes denies the existence of Evil by arguing that: If God is supremely benevolent and supremely powerful, then He would want there to be no evil, and SO there is none.
I draw the reader’s attention to the Indian tradition where there is a widely held view that there is no evil in this world. There are only errors. These errors are due to false judgments. These wrong judgments arise due to ignorance. Also these false judgments arise because of God’s desire to provide Human’s with Free Will. Mistakes are false judgments, and free will allows mistakes. Just imagine a world in which it is proved that God Exists, and further, that orders are given that such and such codes of behavior and conduct are to be followed. I would say that such a world would be a very bleak place! Each man and woman would be reduced to a beast of burden and forced to ‘carry his or her cross’ till death! So I argue that God in His wisdom chose to only give ‘revelations’ at random just to indicate the directions in which the Good lies and left it to humans to judge for themselves. In other words ‘good judgments are indicated by God through revelations’. Each human is free to choose which rules he or she would like to follow and the consequences of your choices are there for you to reap. However much I wish the previous sentence to read friendlier, I am afraid I cannot make it more user-friendly! :-) :-)
Modern Man has of recent years perhaps been displaying many errors of judgments. My theory is that perhaps this has led to a dangerous increase in mental diseases like depression, manic-depressive psychosis and schizophrenia. Ask any psychiatrist who has examined a host of these cases and they will probably tell you that the main errors of the sufferers are ‘errors in cognition’ or ‘cognitive errors’. I pick up from the Wikipedia the description of cognition as :
“In science, cognition is a group of mental processes that includes attention, memory, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions.”
The various cognitive errors that occur in Modern Humans are briefly given below (source Wikipedia):
Many cognitive distortions are also logical fallacies.
§ All-or-nothing thinking (splitting) – Conception in absolute terms, like "always", "every", "never", and "there is no alternative". (also "false dilemma" or "false dichotomy".)
§ Overgeneralization – Extrapolating limited experiences and evidence to broad generalizations. (also faulty generalization and misleading vividness.)
§ Magical thinking - Expectation of specific outcomes based on performance of unrelated acts or utterances. (also wishful thinking.)
§ Mental filter – Inability to view positive or negative features of an experience, for example, noticing only a tiny imperfection in a piece of otherwise useful clothing.
§ Disqualifying the positive – Discounting positive experiences for arbitrary, ad hoc reasons.
§ Jumping to conclusions – Reaching conclusions (usually negative) from little (if any) evidence. Two specific subtypes are also identified:
§ Mind reading – Sense of access to special knowledge of the intentions or thoughts of others.
§ Fortune telling – Inflexible expectations for how things will turn out before they happen.
§ Magnification and minimization – Magnifying or minimizing a memory or situation such that they no longer correspond to objective reality. This is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as "make a mountain out of a molehill." In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype of magnification:
§ Catastrophizing – Inability to foresee anything other than the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.
§ Emotional reasoning – Experiencing reality as a reflection of emotions, e.g. "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
§ Should statements – Patterns of thought which imply the way things "should" or "ought" to be rather than the actual situation the person is faced with, or having rigid rules which the person believes will "always apply" no matter what the circumstances are.Albert Ellis termed this "Musturbation".
§ Labeling and mislabeling – Limited thinking about behaviors or events due to reliance on names; related to over-generalization. Rather than describing the specific behavior, the person assigns a label to someone or himself that implies absolute and unalterable terms. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
§ Personalization – Attribution of personal responsibility (or causal role or blame) for events over which a person has no control.
Such cognitive errors frequently appear in a patient who has been generally making false Judgments of errors out of ignorance. Perhaps it may be true that one of the solutions to this problem is to obtain a balanced view of God, religion and spiritualism. (from personal experience I would be tempted to say that it is the main solution, but that too would be a cognitive error of ‘Over-Generalisation’, and a probable error of ‘Labelling’, and of ‘Emotional reasoning’).
A further tragedy is that such cognitive errors makes a person lose his or her gratitude for the divine and he fails to see its munificence. This lack of gratitude leads to a sort of disgruntlement with life and thence on to a dismal world view and becomes a self-fulfilling monstrous cycle. In my case it turned towards atheism and I began looking for rational reasons for the denial of existence of God. But the overall effect atheism had on me was one of lost hopes for the future and dark pessimism ultimately leading to psychological disorders.
I add that God may prefer to have it this way (and for disbelievers I would add ‘If God Exists!’) leaving the choice of actions to individuals. . In my own case a remarkable healing was effected by a scrupulously careful reading of books affirming the existence of the divine tempered with proper and watchful actions and conduct that lifted me from the morass of despair to normalcy. I however assert that there was a showering of 'Grace' before I embarked on this path. It is still true that I seem to commit quite a few of these cognitive errors but there is healing before it is too late.
Source: Self in http://www.Speakingtree.in/ and certain parts of the text from Wikipedia.
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